Review Summary: A promising mist
Envy are undeniably part of the screamo pantheon at this stage of their career, a fact that makes
Eunoia’s regrettable brevity a uniquely frustrating listening experience. Four drawn-out and taxing years separate the group’s newest release from 2020’s stellar
The Fallen Crimson, a hulking behemoth of a return to form for the band that satiated fans with nearly an hour of top notch songwriting and unforgettable highlights. Make no mistake,
Eunoia still showcases this same revitalized Envy at least once on each of its 6 full-length tracks. However, this state of compositional flow and inspiration is present only in glimpses, and each dazzling moment of presence on the record feels like it’s vanished in a wisp of cool morning air before it can imprint itself upon the listener.
The album’s meager runtime of 30 minutes is not its primary issue, but the band’s attempts to shrink songs that clearly want to develop further down into bite-sized packages ends up leaving a lot to be desired. Tracks that are fully allowed breathing room, such as early highlight “Imagination and Creation”, combine all of Envy’s wonderful idiosyncrasies, scattering booming percussion and ghostly guitar leads underneath alternating trademark spoken word passages and thunderous harsh vocals from Tetsuya Fukugawa. Other cuts like “Beyond the Raindrops” succeed by marrying unrelenting distortion and ferocity with the ethereal aims of the group’s
Insomniac Doze days, juxtaposing the two for maximum effect. Outside of these two sterling efforts (with additional consideration given to the record’s most unapologetically weird and punishing track, “Lingering Echoes”), one will be forced to scrounge more than they expected to find any real meat on
Eunoia’s bones. Don’t get me wrong, every song is at least pleasant to listen to, but most of them point to organizational issues that could have transformed a good album into a great one had they been corrected. Interludes “Piecemeal” and “Lingering Light” unfortunately provide accurate descriptions of themselves through their titles, proving more weightless each time one progresses through the tracklist. The remainder of the album, defined here as “The Night and the Void”, “Whiteout”, and “January’s Dusk” (seriously, that’s all that’s left), shoots itself in the foot by overcommitting to ambience, long strings of spoken word displacing any other vocal style, or rudimentary heaviness in a way that harms album flow, despite each track being adequate in its own right. In particular, “Whiteout” flounders by trying on an angular rhythmic vibe that “Lingering Echoes” outclasses it at, while the two longer numbers in question embody what it’s like to listen to
Eunoia by passing agreeably through one ear and out the other before floating away in the wind, unlikely to return unless significant efforts are made to jog one’s memory. Its peaks and flashes of brilliance are undoubtedly endearing, but upon repeated examination,
Eunoia can’t demonstrate itself as the truly phenomenal album that it is so close to being.
